Few studies exist on the early care and education (ECE) of children who are deaf in low-to-middle-income countries, and none examine the roles of deaf adults in such provision. A research base is needed to inform contextually sensitive "deaf-infused" models of ECE in such contexts that build on indigenous deaf community experience,…

Researchers have focused on how deaf signing children acquire and use American Sign Language (ASL). One sub-skill of ASL proficiency is ASL phonology. This includes the ability to isolate and manipulate parameters within signs (i.e., handshape, location, and movement). Expressively, signed language phonological fluency tasks have investigated…

Over the past decades, changes in technology and policy have made developing and maintaining identity and community increasingly challenging for Deaf individuals. This is particularly obvious in Iceland, where the Deaf community is threatened in its existence. This paper reports on an empirical study that explores how Deaf individuals experience…

An empirical estimate of how many deaf and hard-of-hearing persons use sign language in the USA was obtained a half-century ago, but no study has measured how many people sign regardless of deafness. This study estimated the number of deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing adult signers. Concatenation of the 2010-2018 National Health Interview Surveys…

Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and written discourse. Speakers' ability to change and adjust language according to the communicative circumstances is a prominent factor that demonstrates their linguistic literacy and skill. Nonetheless, few studies have explored the characterization of…

Acculturative stress is associated with negative mental health among culturally diverse individuals. Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) individuals experience acculturative stress as they navigate within and between the Hearing and Deaf communities, yet, research has not examined the relationship between deaf acculturative stress and psychological…

Among the existing sign language assessment tools, only a small number can be used in clinical settings. This contribution aims at presenting three comprehension assessment tests (two lexical and one syntactic) that offer a solid basis to build tools to assess language impairments in deaf signing adults. We provide the material and guidelines,…

Social networking sites (SNS) have become increasingly popular in modern society; however, there is insufficient research into the impacts of SNS use on middle-aged and older Deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) individuals. D/HH SNS users belonging to the Baby Boomer generation or Generation X (born 1946-1980) were recruited for this study. A…

Skilled reading is thought to rely on well-specified lexical representations that compete during visual word recognition. The establishment of these lexical representations is assumed to be driven by phonology. To test the role of phonology, we examined the prime lexicality effect (PLE), the index of lexical competition in signing deaf (N = 28)…

The present study investigated the relative contribution of the two components in the simple view of reading to the reading comprehension skills of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) adults in the Netherlands. Eighty DHH adults, aged between 30 and 80 years old, were tested on word reading, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.…

We tested the utility of two standardized measures of receptive skills in American Sign Language (ASL) in hearing adults who are novice signers: the ASL Comprehension Test (ASL-CT; Hauser, P. C., Paludneviciene, R., Riddle, W., Kurz, K. B., Emmorey, K., & Contreras, J. (2016). American Sign Language Comprehension Test: A tool for sign language…

While there are many benefits of bilingualism and biculturalism, it is increasingly recognized that individuals may also experience acculturative stress as they navigate between different cultural environments. Acculturative stress results from struggles to acculturate, including pressures from the dominant culture and one's heritage culture to…

Recent studies suggest that hearing loss in postlingually deafened adults may be associated with lowered levels of the personality factor Openness to experience. This study investigated whether cochlear implantation in postlingually deafened adults raises the level of Openness to experience. Fifty-five postlingually deafened adults (mean age:…

This study examined the relationships between adult language input and child language production in regard to the quantity and diversity of spoken language, as well as children's knowledge of basic concepts and vocabulary. The quantity and diversity of language provided by teachers and parents were related to children's language output and…

As spatial languages, sign languages rely on spatial cognitive processes that are not involved for spoken languages. Interlocutors have different visual perspectives of the signer's hands requiring a mental transformation for successful communication about spatial scenes. It is unknown whether visual-spatial perspective-taking (VSPT) or mental…